Mahmoud Amghar gives us the rundown on how he created his popular image, Cyrax vs Sektor

In this project overview, I will talk about the process of creating my image, Cyrax vs Sektor.

So, to start I'll tell you about the origin of this project. This idea started out as an entry for a competition on Facebook in the 3D Fan Art Challenge group. The subject was to create a character from a video fighting game like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Tekken or King of Fighters.

At the beginning I decided to make a dynamic pose between 2 similar-looking characters. The idea behind this was to make a single base mesh for two similar characters to optimize the working time, and reduce the number of character choices, for example:
Akuma vs Oni (Street Fighter), Takuma vs Rio (The King of Fighters), Cyrax vs Sektor (Mortal Kombat).

The second factor that pushed me to this choice was my passion for robotics design, which meant that a lot of 3D objects were ready beforehand in my library. This meant that the choice was automatically fixed for the 2 cyber ninjas of Mortal Kombat; Cyrax and Sektor. Once my choice was fixed, the work could start.

References

I searched for and gathered many reference images to inspire me (working on the overall shape, color, materials and other details). Generally I use several keywords in a search engine but if the result is still insufficient I enlarge the number of possibilities by translating them into several languages.

To add a personal touch, I had the idea of reworking the design into my own style (though of course, without losing the spirit of Mortal Kombat). This took a lot of time because I needed to find new traits with another aspect of realism.

Usually, the conception requires simple tools, such as a pencil and paper to sketch, or some clay to make a global shape. The current technology allowed me to use both at the same time: a stylus and digital clay – in other words, ZBrush.

Modeling

So to start, I began with a primitive sphere or a standard base mesh converted into DynaMesh. DynaMesh is perfect for allowing users to sculpt in low and medium resolution without the cares of topology constraints, and is an ideal solution to start sculpting a volume base for any mesh.

This image shows a few of the brushes I used while modeling

Modeling time lapse

As already mentioned before, and to help you understand the developmental stages of my workflow, here is a time-lapse video which gives you an idea of how I created the bust of a similar robot.